I SAW THIS AND I AM SO SCARED BUT WITH GOD ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE, IT IS WELL WITH MY SOUL!
http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2014/02/01/a_rare_look_inside_the_black_box_of_canada_immigration.html
A rare look inside the ‘black box’ of Canada immigration
By: Nicholas Keung Immigration reporter, Published on Sat Feb 01 2014
It is always a mystery how immigration officials come to the conclusion if a marriage is genuine or fake, but now a new study has shed light on the inner thinking of the decision-makers.
McMaster University professor Vic Satzewich was given rare access by Citizenship and Immigration Canada inside Canada’s overseas visa posts to examine how visa officers used their discretionary power to decide who deserved to join their spouses here.
Satzewich is believed to be only the second Canadian researcher in 50 years being granted such access to what he calls the immigration department’s “black box,” after the late University of Toronto professor Freda Hawkins did her field research at the visa posts in Europe in 1964 to study immigration’s frontline operations.
Between 2010 and 2012, Satzewich was granted site visits at 11 visa offices — in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia — to observe how individual immigration applications were processed. He interviewed 128 frontline officers and managers on how they reached their decisions.
Satzewich identified a number of “flags” and “indicators” that visa officers rely on in their assessments:
Applicants who come from poor countries, need a visa to visit Canada and are from cities or regions of countries where fraud is common;
Couples who don’t have a common language of communication, have not met before marriage, do not know details in each others’ personal histories and current lives, and are deemed not compatible in age, physical appearance and values;
In one application that Satzewich observed, an officer in India flagged the case because “there is a seven-year difference in age between the couple and the sponsor is a divorcee and only five days elapsed between when the couple first met and the marriage.”
In another, at a South American visa post, officials approved an application because “this is positive. She does not have a history of trying to get out of Colombia.”
However, sponsored spouses who had previously lived in Canada always draw suspicions. An applicant facing deportation suddenly getting married often raises concerns, said one officer from a Caribbean visa post.
And in what seems like a unique investigative technique, Canadian officials scrutinize photographic evidence — who and how many people attended the ceremony, the demeanor and if the guests smiled — to help assess credibility.
In the Caribbean, a small wedding of 30 attendees was defined as normal, said Satzewich, but in Punjab, the norm is 300, 400 guests.
“Nobody in the photos is smiling,” a visa officer told Satzewich. “It’s a Sikh temple, so it’s a serious occasion, but nobody is smiling. Nobody seems happy. This is a concern,” the officer added before referring the applicant to a further in-person interview.
And an excessive confession of love in a couple’s correspondence can backfire.
“The love letters are out of this world. They know that we are reading them, so they write them for us,” said one official deployed in a Caribbean visa post.
“You can’t talk about love all the time. You have to talk about something else,” joked another.
Satzewich’s analysis is based on 220 hours of field work inside visa offices appears in the February edition of the Canadian Review of Sociology Journal published Saturday.
“Credibility is central to a Canadian visa officer’s decision about spousal admissibility,” Satzewich said in his article, titled Canadian Visa Officers and the Social Construction of ‘Real’ Spousal Relationships.
“Credibility is ‘worked up,’ or constructed, by visa officers who rely on a variety of typifications of what normal cases look like. These typifications serve as bases for defining some applicants as undeserving, while at the same time defining other applicants as deserving.”
With marriage of convenience being Ottawa’s catchphrase on the abuse of the immigration system in recent years, Canada has tightened sponsorship rules by making permanent residence conditional upon a couple living together for two years and banning the sponsored spouse from sponsoring another partner within five years.
Screening a relationship before a foreign spouse arrives in Canada is at the forefront of the control mechanism to detect frauds, said Satzewich.
Visa officers deem some as “genuine” applicants who tell the truth, are in real relationships and follow the rules and the “fake” who use marriage as a tool to acquire immigrant status, said Satzewich, who wondered if racial biases played any role in officers’ decision making.
“The system allows racial biases to creep in the selection process. They could use their authority to put it bluntly and crudely, to keep Canada white,” Satzewich noted.
While rejection rates are undoubtedly higher in some visa offices than others, Satzewich said it should not be interpreted that visa officers racially discriminate against applicants or treat those from some countries more harshly than others to keep them out of Canada.
“For an individual visa officer, a high rejection rate means they have to work harder and process proportionately more applications in a year to find enough ‘deserving’ cases,” said Satzewich, referring to the annual government acceptance quotas they have to meet.
Satzewich said he was taken back by how few face-to-face interviews with immigration applicants are being conducted as the government gradually shifted to a paper-screening selection process that is based on objective documentations such as official language test results.
“But in the end, I came away with a lot more confidence into our immigration system and a better appreciation of the complexity of what our visa officers do,” he said.
